Inside the package, you'll find the following:

• Theatrix PCI sound card
• Quick Installation Guide
• A mini-din plug with 5 RCA outputs
• Single CD containing drivers & software:
  (Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 drivers
  Windows 98 and Windows 2000 WDM drivers),
  EzAudio, JetAudio, Willow Talk and and 
  MP3 player application)

The basics are in there.  There is no manual and no extra software that comes with this kit, at least not with the one we received. I was a bit disappointed to see that there is no bundled software DVD player like PowerDVD or WinDVD, so if you want to watch DVD's you'll have to get one elsewhere, but we'll let you know which players do in fact work with this card.  The Mini-Din 5 output plug will be described in the next section.

The back plate of this board has 3 standard 3.5mm miniplug connectors, one for speaker out, one for Mic in and one for line in. In addition to this, there is a 9 pin Mini-Din port and a game/MIDI port.  Best Data supplies a 1 foot cable which connects to the Mini-Din port and branches out to 5 RCA connectors.  They are neatly labeled as follows:  S/PDIF out, Front Out, Rear Out, Center Out and Subwoofer Out.  So, you can either hook up a regular set of 3-piece speakers to the line-out of the card or you can hook up you're home Dolby Digital Receiver directly to these 4 outputs using RCA cables.  On the card itself, there is both a Sony and Panasonic type CD-ROM/DVD-ROM audio-in connector and a Video-in connector.

Since I only have a regular Dolby Pro Logic Receiver, I did not have the inputs available to connect directly to my receiver.  Instead, I used Skywell's Magic Theatre Pro 6-piece speaker set which connects directly into the 9-pin port on the card.  This was a quick and simple way to test the Dolby Digital capabilities of the card.  I also connected a Boston Acoustics Media Theatre 3-piece set to see how good the sound quality was.

The actual Installation of the card was as simple as any other plug-n-play device.  Windows immediately detected the card upon boot up, so I inserted the provided CD and installed the drivers.  This also installed the QSound 2.03 Q3D API and then I proceeded to install the Yamaha XG50 Voice Wavetable software and that was it.

The first test was sound quality.  Overall the sound quality was good on both speaker sets.  For playing games, MP3's and CD's the system sounds great, and very clear with no noticeable noise.  The reverb effect in the QSound control panel worked quite nicely, there is a large list of environments which you can choose from which alter the audio output to sound like you're in that environment.  They don't quite sound as good as the Sound Blaster Live! but they aren't bad.  Low frequency enhancement and Stereo expansion were also provided in this applet, but they didn't really make too much of a difference to me, it's all a matter of the listener's preference.

Since this card uses the Yamaha XG50 software for its wavetable, I decided to play some MIDI songs and see how it sounded.  The quality using the XG50 driver was a lot better than FM synthesis, but nowhere near as good sounding as the hardware wavetable's of the SB Live! or Vortex2, but this is meant to be a value card, and is MIDI really that important these days?

Even though MIDI may not be that important, I did come across a major downside to card when I was just casually using Windows and various apps.  There is only one hardware audio stream!!  This means that when you're playing a game, you will not be able to hear people on your ICQ contact list trying to message you, and you cannot play an MP3 and hear your default Windows sounds at the same time.  This is a major annoyance that most of us didn't really notice back in the days when multi-tasking was not mainstream, but now multi-tasking has become an integral part of computing and all sounds cards should have multiple sound streams.  This is the biggest downside I see to this card.  If you're like me and can't live without multiple streams, then don't even consider this card because you'll be disappointed.  If you don't multi-task very much and don't care about multiple streams, then it may not even matter to you.

On to games,  A3D 1.x and EAX emulation through the QSound 2.0 API both worked very well.  Most of the games I tried worked without any hassle.  Games which use A3D 2.0, like Quake 3, do not seem to work, so you'll have to use regular DirectSound3D or stereo.  Positioning with the 6 speaker system worked quite well.  QSound even provides a nice little applet which you can use to test the sound output from each individual speaker; you'll hear a female voice speaking out of the speaker, telling you which speaker you should be hearing.  You can find a couple shots of the applets below:

Click on the images for a full size version
Let's you choose two, four or six speaker mode and even has a test to hear each individual channel.	Lets you adjust reverb and Stereo Expansion and Low Frequency Enhancement

Next Page: DVD Playback, Ratings and Conclusion

Hardware Pros Home Page